March 10th

CostumeTalk.com is pleased to welcome Drea Leed, independent scholar and owner of the most extensive Elizabethan and Tudor costuming reference on the Web, The Elizabethan Costume Page (www.elizabethancostume.net), as our speaker April 12-13, 2008, in Eugene, Oregon. Two full days of lectures capped off with two hands-on, limited attendance workshops!

March 8th

Rosslyn Chapel, the 15th century C.E. Scottish church featured in The Da Vinci Code, reports a UK£1.35m budget surplus due to the stream of visitors who came to see the building depicted in the book and film.

The recent release of the animated film Beowulf has rekindled interest in the epic poem. Harper's Magazine provides a stanza from the poem, read in Old English, as well as a great photo of a jeweled brooch.

Professor Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford University Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, is hoping to run new tests on the Shroud of Turin. He believes that tests run in 1988 to date the relic may have been contaminated.

"According to this oddly plotted and frantically paced pastiche — written by Peter Morgan, directed by Justin Chadwick — the girls were more or less the Paris and Nicky Hilton of the Tudor court," writes reviewer Manohla Dargis for the New York Times.

A Culture Minister in England has temporarily blocked export of the Dering Roll, the earliest English roll of arms, in order to "provide a last chance to raise the money to keep the roll in the United Kingdom."

For many in the SCA and other Middle Ages living history organizations, the first introduction to acting the part of someone from a medieval culture was a game of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of D&D more than 30 years ago, died today after several years of declining health.

A jaded den of deceit and treachery is the common perception of the medieval Byzantine Empire, but a new book by Judith Herrin offers a different interpretation, one that includes a rich cultural and religious life. M.M. Bennetts has the review for the Christian Science Monitor.

Medieval texts have called the palace of Kenneth MacAlpine, the first king of a united Scotland, a stone building, but modern researchers believe it would have been wooden. Now recent discoveries lead the experts to think they may be close to zeroing in on the location.